In Hyderbad, a company called Wipro is training
Indian workers to speak with “Midwestern American and working
class British accents” in order to answer service calls for
companies like Dell Computer Corporation and Oracle. These are
entry level positions that would have once gone (in the American
labor market) to high school graduates. Now, they are being done
by East Indians who, as the chart above points out, make less
money a year than an inner-city black high school student would
make at McDonald’s in six months.

What is even more significant for American
worker is that there are aggressive forces in India preparing its
workforce not just to receive outsourced jobs but to develop their
own version of California’s “Silicon Valley.” One has but to
recall the negative effect that Japanese carmakers, Toyota,
Mitsubishi and Nissan, had on the domestic automobile market to
imagine what might happen to the American high tech companies if
they must face competition from abroad. In less than a decade from
the time Japanese cars entered the American market, their cars
were considered to be a better value than their American
counterparts. HyderBad

African
American Journalists in Harlem, 1936. The U.S.
corporate media segregated the reporters and the
news until the late 1960s following the mass
rebellions throughout the U.S. Prior to that
time, many corporate daily newspapers had special
days for carrying so-called "Colored News" which
consisted of sports, entertainment and crime.
African American papers were banned in the
segregated south a...nd had to be smuggled into
those communities by the Pullman Porters. Black reporters
were often chased out of town, beaten and killed by
members of the KKK and other white racist
organizations. During WWI and WW2, African American
newspaper publishers and editors were threatened
with censorship and closure under century-old
Sedition Laws by the U.S. government for reporting
on racism in the U.S. military.—Charles
Simmons

Reporters for the New York
Amsterdam News at work in the newsroom, 1936.—Photo
by Lucien Aigner

*
* * * *

Update

Black Studies and Digital Humanities

A Growing List of Online Resources

Compiled by Kenton Rambsy
& Goyland Williams

I am interested in online
mediums, blogs in particular, can be used as a space to think
through ideas when preparing larger publications, getting
immediate feedback, and simply giving larger audiences access to
new ideas and information. In terms of bridging the gap between
“Digital Humanities” and “Black Studies,” developing an online
presence is crucial. Online websites concerning black culture
serve as points of entry for how wider audiences engage in
scholarship about African American life and history.

Below, this list
constitutes the growing “digital resources” by professors,
public figures, collective groups, and institutions that can be
used to discuss and study issues in Black Studies. Ranging
from the personal blog of Professor
Adam Banks and rhetorical matters to digital archives of HistoryMakers,
the innovative means by which social networking and online
mediums are used to create and shape conversations about black
culture is noteworthy.

Seven ways mobile phones have changed
lives in Africa—Tolu Ogunlesi—14 September 2012—A little
over a decade ago there were about 100,000 phone lines in
Nigeria, mostly landlines run by the state-owned telecoms
behemoth, NITEL. Today NITEL is dead, and Nigeria has close to
100 million mobile phone lines, making it Africa's largest
telecoms market, according to statistics by the Nigerian
Communications Commission. Across the rest of the continent the
trends are similar: between 2000 and 2010, Kenyan mobile phone
firm Safaricom saw its subscriber base increase in excess of
500-fold.

In 2010 alone the number of mobile phone users in
Rwanda grew by 50%, figures from the country's regulatory agency
show. During the early years of mobile in Africa, the Short
Messaging Service (SMS) was at the heart of the revolution.
Today the next frontier for mobile use in Africa is the
internet. "Mobile is fast becoming the PC of Africa," says Osibo
Imhoitsike, market coordinator for Sub-Saharan Africa at
Norwegian firm Opera, whose mobile browser is enjoying an
impressive uptake on the continent.

"In fact there isn't really
anything more personal than a mobile phone nowadays." Last
October, for the first time ever, the number of Nigerians
accessing the internet via their mobiles surpassed the number of
desktop internet users, figures from Statcounter show.

The trend has continued since
then. Most of those devices will be low-end Nokia
phones, tens of millions of which have already been
sold on the continent.

The more
expensive "smartphones" are however also increasing in
popularity, as prices drop. Blackberry's market share has been
rising in the developing world, bucking the trend in Europe and
North America. Google, for its part, plans to sell 200 million
of its Android phones in Africa and it is estimated that by 2016
there will be a billion mobile phones on the continent. In 2007,
President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, said: "In 10 short years, what
was once an object of luxury and privilege, the mobile phone,
has become a basic necessity in Africa." (Watch video from Kenya
on how mobile has changed Africa.)

Racism: A History,
the 2007 BBC 3-part documentary explores the impact of racism on
a global scale. It was part of the season of programs on the BBC
marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the
British Empire. It's divided into 3 parts.

Begins the series by
assessing the implications of the relationship between Europe,
Africa and the Americas in the 15th century. It considers how
racist ideas and practices developed in key religious and
secular institutions, and how they showed up in writings by
European philosophers Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.

Examines the idea of
scientific racism, an ideology invented during the 19th century
that drew on now discredited practices such as phrenology and
provided an ideological justification for racism and slavery.
The episode shows how these theories ultimately led to eugenics
and Nazi racial policies of the master race.

Examines the impact of
racism in the 20th century. By 1900 European colonial expansion
had reached deep into the heart of Africa. Under the rule of
King Leopold II, the Belgian Congo was turned into a vast rubber
plantation. Men, women and children who failed to gather their
latex quotas would have their limbs dismembered. The country
became the scene of one of the century's greatest racial
genocides, as an estimated 10 million Africans perished under
colonial rule.

Facebook and Twitter
were the top outlets where people found out about the U.S.'
attack on Osama bin Laden's compound. This just shows the
evolution of social networks as news sources, which means
communications pros must at the least have an active
listening/monitoring plan in place to stay close to their
community online as well as their targeted media.—Priya
Ramesh, Director, Social Media Strategy, CRT/tanaka

Blogging will grow
increasingly important for otherwise “traditional” publications.
Journalists will be required to generate more stories with an
eye for driving traffic.

Search
engine optimization (SEO) will
be increasingly important. This will be important for
journalists looking for sources and for journalists posting
stories. Just as the media use search to find experts and be the
first with the story, they will find their own content
development will drive traffic to their own site(s).

Geo-targeting efforts
will extend to the media and their need to find sources that are
relevant for their stories in a hyperlocal world.—Johna
Burke, Senior Vice President, BurrellesLuce

*
* * * *

Saying Bye-Bye
To Britannica—Kaila
Colbin—16 March 2012—In 1999, Ken LaVan and I wrote
a book called “The Real People’s Guide to the Internet.”
In it, we marveled at the Internet’s size and power.
“Currently, there are approximately 132 million people
who use the Internet,” we wrote, “and, by the year 2000,
it is estimated that 400 million people will access the
Web.” According to
Internet World Stats, that prediction was a bit
high—there were almost 361 million online at the end of
2000. By the end of 2011, however, that number had grown
to more than 2.2 billion. Our book described the many
navigational guides available to Net surfers: Goto,
Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista. The screen shot
demonstrating the Yahoo! search results for “weather”
showed 3,854 sites—and lamented the “overabundance of
information.” “Real People,” we said, “do not have time
to look through that much information to find what they
are looking for.” Though we didn’t discuss it, at the
same time as our book was being published, a whole new
genre of website was being born: the online
encyclopedia. And they struggled, at first. Nupedia,
the peer-reviewed predecessor to Wikipedia,
launched in March 2000, but by November that year, it
had only published two full-length articles.
Everything2, from the creators of Slashdot, gave
writers experience points for contributing. Even Douglas
Adams (of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fame)
launched a “Hitchhiker”-based online encyclopedia called
h2g2 in 1999; however, his company TDV ran out of money
in 2000 and the site got taken over by the BBC. The
future of online encyclopedias was anything but certain.
But this week, with the announcement by Encyclopedia
Britannica that it is discontinuing its print
edition, the Internet has officially won. . . . Nearly
everyone points to Wikipedia as Goliath to Britannica’s
David. Wikipedia is certainly an excellent resource—and
always, I tell students, a good starting place for
online research. Britannica’s competition, however, is
not just a different online encyclopedia; it is the
whole World Wide Web. Increased content has meant that,
when faced with my own ignorance, my first port of call
is the search bar. If Wikipedia has the answer, I’ll get
there through the SERPs; but I can just as easily access
a YouTube video or eHow.—MediaPost

*
* * * *

Huria Search—Discover the Global Black Community—Huria Search improves the internet experience for people looking for content created by the GBC and to help support the efforts of those websites. Websites thrive when they can be found. Higher visibility allows websites to earn more revenue, attract better writers, garner more visitors who interact with the website and provide valuable promotion. . . . Huria Search is financed by donors and developed by volunteers. This site is completely driven our collective mission to support the global Black community. List of Sites Included in Huria Search's Index

Google Worsens Web
Experience by Retuning Poor Search Results—8 August 8, 2011—Troy—The majority
of new visitors to AALBC.com arrive via a Google search. I suspect
the same is true for most other websites. I’ve also heard and read
additional speculation that Google skews their query results to
sites that purchase a great deal of online adverting through
Google’s AdWords. While I can not prove this; the search results
shown by the example above do not rule this assertion out.

Of course it could be that web
page popularity is a significant factor in Google’s search
algorithm. The sites or pages with the most traffic would tend to
rank higher. Perhaps the very popular, AOL owned, Huffington Post
can exert dominance and higher page ranking simply because of it
prominence.Even if the Huffington post brought $10 million dollars
in Google ads and was more frequently visited than Facebook; there
is no way one can justify that a page containing two sentences
(quoted above) belong in the top ten of a search result for the
query string “Terry
McMillan“. That Huffington Post page would be appropriate
result for a query entered something like this:
Terry McMillan Tweet Willow Jaden Smith

I fully realize I could be
making things worse for myself by making these accusations against
Google in a public forum. I have first hand experience with
Google shooting first and asking questions later (yet another topic
for a future rant). However, this is a very important issue that
needs additional scrutiny and awareness. We are already losing
on-line sources for quality news and information because of a lack
of platforms for good journalists and writers. Now the potential
for these platforms are hampered even more by having their content
devalued relative to sites that promote more scandalous or otherwise
less valuable and relevant information.

As large corporate entities
produce, broker, promote and manufacture more scandal, and companies
like Google make this information more accessible by elevating it in
its search results; we are witnessing the Internet becoming less
free while corporate interests contort the world wide web in to a
entity where profit is the only motive.—aalbc

*
* * * *

There’s more going
on here, too, with the difficulty in securing
advertisers within each territory or island-wide. While
easier today than 50 years ago, getting ads still has
much to do with political power, race, and fear of
speaking out or writing (NB: anonymous letters to the
editor) which can lead to losing one’s job or business,
or not getting a particular job or contract; it has to
do with who controls what sectors of the economy, and
what and who a journalist or the media dare to report or
editorialize on critically. This is especially true when
there is an “issue” with, for example, the firing of
hotel workers and not identifying the hotel owners by
name or pictures, the spoiled-rotten golden goose of
tourism, corruption, racism, language of instruction and
its relationship to school failure rates, or, heaven
forbid, independence for St. Martin (South and North).

And the
ad-challenged areas probably have nothing to do with any
St. Martin exceptionalism. Nevertheless, Allen, as a
relatively new media owner/publisher, will have to
smartly tough it out through the establishment and the
advertising minefield like the forebears of his trade—St.
Martin Internet News: Samuel Allen, Jr.

*
* * * *

A New Google Venture and
Another Web Boundary Line Is Nudged—Claire Cain Miller and
Nick Bilton—2 December 2011—Google
is working on a delivery service that would let people order
items from local stores on the Web and receive them at their
homes or offices within a day. The service is in an early
testing phase, and it was described by three people briefed on
the project who were not authorized to speak about it publicly
before it was announced. It is part of a bigger, strategic
effort by Google to move beyond its core search business by
helping people buy things, not just find them.

Other parts of this
strategy include Google Wallet to make payments by cellphone,
Google Offers for daily deals, apps that show location-based
mobile ads and product search for local stores. The idea behind
the new delivery service is that people searching for products
online or on their phones could buy something from a local
retailer or the local branches of nationwide chains, and could
then take the next step—delivery—through Google.

Google does not intend to
build stores or warehouses or become a retailer itself, two of
the people briefed on the delivery service said. Instead, it is
talking with potential partners, including retailers and
possibly couriers.

The service is the latest
example of how the biggest tech companies — including Google,
Apple and Amazon—are trying to branch out and, in the process,
blurring the lines between their core businesses.

For example, Apple’s iTunes
business is formidable, and much of its success in selling
phones and tablets, which compete with Google’s
Android and Chrome devices, comes from its retail stores.
And shoppers increasingly search Amazon directly, instead of
looking first for products on Google, in part because of
Amazon’s Prime program, which offers free two-day shipping for a
$79 annual fee. Amazon also operates AmazonFresh, a local
delivery service focused on groceries, in Seattle.—NYTimes

*
* * * *

Pew Report: African Americans Outpace Whites in
Mobile Phone, App Usage—by Sherri L. Smith—23
September 2010—As the discussion on net
neutrality and equal access to high-speed Internet
continues, minorities continue to make strides in
closing the digital divide. According to the
Pew Internet & American Life Project, minorities
are not only gaining access to the Web, we’re doing
it without necessarily having to access a desktop or
a laptop.

When it comes to social media, we’re not
only using it at a higher rate, but we also have a
different perspective on how we engage with the
technology. According to the
report, since 2000, the racial makeup of
American Internet users has started to more closely
resemble the offline population.

In fact the amount of black
and Latino users has almost doubled from 11% to 21%. In
addition, increasing amounts of African Americans have broadband
in their homes although whites are still leading. Blacks are
also less likely to go online or own a desktop computer compared
to their white counterparts. 51% of African Americans own a
desktop compared to 65% of whites.

While African Americans
might not being using desktops to access the Web, the mobile
sector is a whole new ballgame. According to the report, Latinos
and blacks are more likely to own a mobile phone than whites and
outpace whites in
mobile app use. Compared with white cell phone owners,
blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to use their
mobile devices to: Text message (70% of all African-Americans
and English-speaking Latinos use text messaging, vs. just over
half of whites).—BlackWeb20

Growing Up Digital Wired
for Distraction—By Matt Richtel—21 November 2010—Students
have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers
and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer,
pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects
adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk,
they say, is that developing brains can become more easily
habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks—and
less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded
not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said
Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School
and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health
in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re
raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains
are going to be wired differently.”

But even as some parents
and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they
are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom,
seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them
essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping
themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so
they can teach on the students’ technological territory.—NYTimes

*
* * * *

Black Bloggers Get
Played By the White House—A Black Agenda Radio commentary by
BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon—“Real journalists would have
laughed those anonymous spokesperson and “off the record”
requirements right out of the room. Ethical journalists only
grant anonymity to sources like whistle blowers with
well-founded fears of retaliation..”

In the words of
I.F. Stone, one of the 20th century's great investigative
journalists, “Governments lie. All governments lie.” Stone's
words are as true now as they were when he uttered them more
than half a century ago.

When the White House
invited black bloggers in for a
Columbus Day meeting, they were told they could print
anything they heard in the first half of the meeting, but that
they could attribute none of it to any White House spokesperson
by name, while the second half of their meeting would be
completely “off the record.” Fortunately, or perhaps by design,
none of the invited bloggers were actually journalists. They
hailed mostly from celebrity gossip sites like
ConcreteLoop, and
Young, Black and Fabulous, from
BET and
Essence magazine, from
BlackSingles.Com.—BlackAgendaReport

*
* * * *

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The
Huffington Post—7 February 2011—The
Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1
million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily
visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by
AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online
media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday
evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday.
AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the
rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition
since it was separated from
Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand
its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its
chief executive,
Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long
decline.—NYTimes

*
* * * *

Cuba
launches Wikipedia style encyclopaedia—By
Sandy M. Fernández—Published
—13 December 2010—Cuba
launched its own open, Wikipedia-style online
encyclopaedia on Tuesday with an estimated 20,000
articles. The website is
www.ecured.cu. “EcuRed emerges in Cuba and in
the Spanish language, with the will to create and
spread knowledge from a decolonizing, objective and
truthful point of view,” a statement posted on the
website said. The site went down for a while
Tuesday, apparently due to excessive demand. The
online encyclopaedia is an initiative of a
government-run network with 600 computer centres
around the island, and more than 1,150 content
developers.—IOL

*
* * * *

Small Change—Why the
revolution will not be tweeted—By
Malcolm Gladwell—October 4, 2010—Twitter is a way of
following (or being followed by) people you may never have met.
Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances,
for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able
to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand
“friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life. This is
in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties,
as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our
acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new
ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of
these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency.
It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary
collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and
the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties
seldom lead to high-risk activism. . . .

The evangelists of social
media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe
that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that
signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is
activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch
counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly
effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But
that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing
participation—by lessening the level of motivation that
participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur
Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of
nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook
has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five
cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on
average, fifteen cents.

A spokesperson for the Save
Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge
someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve
given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical
population. They inform their community, attend events,
volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a
ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by
motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating
them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated
enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the
lunch counters of Greensboro. . . .

The drawbacks of networks
scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic
change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a
splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if
you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have
to be a hierarchy.—NewYorker

*
* * * *

Cell phones cut maternal deaths in Ghana—Cell phones have cut dramatically the
number of women dying during childbirth in Amensie village in
south-central Ghana, according to local health officials. Health
and aid workers say while other improvements in primary
healthcare in Amensie - as part of the Millennium Villages
project - have contributed to the drop, the availability of cell
phones has been pivotal. . . . In 2006 mobile handset producer
Ericsson teamed up with mobile telecommunications firm Zain to
install internet access and mobile phone coverage in the
villages in 2006. They distributed free handsets to health
workers and sold handsets to villagers for US$10 each.“We entered the project because we believe information and
communications technology play a critical role in helping to end
the poverty cycle,” Elaine Weidman, Vice-President of Corporate
Responsibility at Ericsson, told IRIN.The UN says maternal health overall has improved in Bonsaaso due
to improved primary healthcare services. But Madam Owusu said
the drop in deaths during childbirth is due, primarily, to
information and communication technologies (ICT) plus the
ambulance.

*
* * * *

Black
lawmakers work to close 'digital divide'—By Vince
Rogers—July 30-August 5, 2010—Broadband is an
umbrella term for technology that provides high-speed
connection to the internet. Some 92 percent of the general
population has access to such technology, Smyre said,
compared to 42 percent in minority, rural, and low-income
communities."Minorities and poor communities are being left
behind as a result of the increased cost of computers,
limited broadband access and lack of digital literacy,"
Smyre said. "So much money, access and quality of life
issues are connected to finding a solution to this
issue.With only four of 10 African Americans having
broadband access, he said, "our policies initiatives must
address accessibility and affordability," he said. Atlanta
City Councilman Michael Julian Bond said it is vital that
black elected officials fight to close the digital divide.—The
Atlanta Voice

*
* * * *

Students trust high
Google search rankings too much—By Jacqui Cheng—The
researchers observed 102 college freshmen performing searches on
a computer for specific information—usually with Google, but
also making use of Yahoo, SparkNotes, MapQuest, Microsoft (we
assume this means Bing), Wikipedia, AOL, and Facebook. Most
students clicked on the first search result no matter what it
was, and more than a quarter of respondents said explicitly that
they chose it because it was the first result. "In some cases,
the respondent regarded the search engine as the relevant entity
for which to evaluate trustworthiness, rather than the Web site
that contained the information," wrote researchers Eszter
Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, and
Kristin Yates Thomas. . . .

Only 10 percent of the
participants mentioned the author or author's credentials when
performing their research, and according to screen captures of
those students, "none actually followed through by verifying
either the identification or the qualifications of the authors."
The researchers said this was the case even when the student
stated directly that he or she should check to see who the
authors were and what their qualifications were.

Students did acknowledge
that certain websites—mostly those ending in .gov, .edu—were
more credible than others because they weren't written by "just
anybody." However, some felt the same way about .org sites, and
were unaware that .org domains could be sold to anyone (and
therefore have about the same credibility as any .com out
there).

Still, the takeaway is that
a large majority of students give more weight to the search tool
they're using than the sites they're finding via those searches.
The paper quoted numerous students professing their particular
love for Google, or talking about how Microsoft's search
services are credible because Microsoft is a "more professional"
company—basically, search engine brands meant a lot to the
students using them, and those students seem to place
credibility on the automated search rankings provided by those
services.—ArsTechnica

*
* * * *

Internet World Stats News—January 25, 2009—Internet
World Stats says internet users number over 1.5 billion—Note that these are early figures, and that breakdowns by
country are not yet available in this database for end-2008.
More complete data is available for mid-2008 at
Internet users in the world already hit one and a half billion
persons approximately in July of 2008. The current estimates of
Internet users for 2008 year-end (2008Q4) according to our
database, which includes ALL the Internet users universe,
comprises
over 1,573,269,743 persons worldwide. The Internet Penetration
Rate is 23.4%, considering a global population of 6,708,755,756
persons according to the U.S. Census Bureau data.—Internet
World Stats

*
* * * *

Chinese Internet Audience
Outranks U.S.—China represented the largest online audience in the world in
December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing
nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience,
followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent
share), Germany
(3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share). [Others in
the top 15 countries included France and India, each with over
3% of the world audience; Russia, Brazil, South Korea, Canada,
and Italy, each with over 2% of the world audience; and Mexico
and the Netherlands, each with 1.2% of the world audience.—ComScore

*
* * * *

Africa: Internet Growth Accelerating

AfricaFocus Bulletin
Feb 4, 2009 (090204)

Editor's Note

"Until recently, the experience of the internet in Africa has
been like having to eat a three-course meal by sucking it
through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable and expensive. ..
[but prices are dropping] and cheap international bandwidth is
an essential component for any developing country to remain
competitive in a changing world."—Russell
Southwood, in Global Information Society Watch 2008

Southwood goes on to note that new undersea cables, two of them
due to be completed this year, are predicted to cut
international bandwidth prices for some African countries by as
much as 90%, and that there will be strong pressure for reducing
costs inside
countries as well, as well as for finding new ways to bring
cheaper connections to neglected rural areas.

Although Africa still remains last among world regions in
estimated internet penetration (5.4% of the population as
compared to the world average of 23.4%, according to end-2008
figures from Internet World Stats - see article below), it also
features a growth rate of over 1,000% between 2000 and mid-2008,
with an estimated 19.8% growth rate between end 2007 and end
2008. Internet World Stats now estimates more than 51 million
internet users in Africa, while leading expert Southwood
estimates an even higher user/population rate, if usage at
internet cafes is fully taken into account.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from two recent
articles on global internet usage, the first from the commercial
firm ComScore (http://www.comscore.com)
and the second from the web site Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com),
which also provides more detailed estimates by country. The
Bulletin also contains excerpts from Russell Southwood's article
on Trends in Technology, from the Global Information Society
Watch 2008 report, released in December. Additional articles
from GISW 2008 are available for download at
http://giswatch.org, and a press release on the report is at
http://www.apc.org/en/node/7558

Bandwidth, the petrol of
the new global economy—Put simply, bandwidth is what carries
voice and data from one place to another. Bandwidth is the
petrol of the new global economy; and cheap international
bandwidth is an essential component for any developing country
to remain competitive in a changing world. . . . Used
strategically, bandwidth can create new “think work” industries
like business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres. For
example, a single company in Ghana, ACS, employs 1,200 people
doing data processing. The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius
employs between 4,000 and 5,000 people in a combination of BPO
and call centres. Over 10,000 people in the South African city
of Cape Town work in these sectors. . . .

Take the example of West
Africa. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC),there are three waves of population movement. Since the
early 1960s, 80 million people have moved to the cities from
rural areas. Populations also move from one country to another
in West Africa, and this represents 90% of inter-regional
migration. Finally, West Africans represent 3% of immigrants
from non-OECD countries living in Europe.
Each of these people needs to be able to communicate with their
family. . . .

Financial remittances flow
all the way down this chain of communication and, according to
the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in
2006 these were worth USD 10 billion to West African countries.
These remittances exceed the amount of money spent by
international donors. But the cost of sending that money is
around 12% of the total, whereas elsewhere in the world, such as
Latin America, it has fallen to 6%. Cheaper communications and
competition can bring cheaper transaction costs, and more of
this money will arrive in developing countries.

The first wave of the
communications revolution in Africa was the spread of mobile
phones, which are now within reach of 60-70% of the continent’s
population. By contrast, the internet is only accessed by 12-15%
of the population. Until recently, the experience of the
internet in Africa has been like having to eat a three-course
meal by sucking it through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable
and expensive.

While new mobile interfaces
will increasingly allow mobile internet access, the second wave
of the communications revolution will be the spread of
relatively cheap internet use. For developing countries,
particularly in Africa, the internet has been the poor cousin of
much more widely distributed technologies like mobile phones and
radio. However, despite the limitations of speed and cost, a
surprisingly large number of people use it.

Based on national survey
samples from a range of twelve African countries of different
income levels,between 2-15% of the population use the internet (except in
the two poorest countries) and 1-8% use it on a daily basis
(except for the four poorest countries). On this basis, there
might easily be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of
broadband subscribers depending on the size of country. Literacy
plays a part, but probably not as big a part as price.
GISWatch

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits.

*
* * * *

What is significant for
these “information activists” and their anti-capitalist
organizations—the new computer linked social movement—to
understand is that their activities have already caught the eyes
of “independent critical intellectuals, mainstream social
scientists and National
Security Analysts.”

Cleaver’s paper, itself,
is a compilation from various sources. But, from reading
Cleaver’s paper, it is clear that he was deeply impressed by
the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These
intellectuals were able to transcend “Left notions of
structuralism” and “dialectics” and have instead been able
to focus on the “micro-dynamics of the individual and the
social movements” themselves.

In other words, these men
scrapped the old way of analyzing social movements and their
participants in favor of different and more revealing analysis.
What they have concluded is that there is emerging a global
network of progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries linked by
modern information technology—e-mail, cell phone, pc’s, etc.
that yield power greater than the sum of their parts. NetWar

*
* * * *

Technical foul on the old guy—it's
interesting to seeAmerica's oldest presidential
candidate out on the hustings transforming himself
into a yahoo and a cracker.
. . . And it's an amazing country where an
Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South
Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. . . .
whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and
was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent
student, much like the Current Occupant, both of
them men who are very lucky that their fathers were
born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up
without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a
computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for
him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he
thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do
that for more than thirty seconds at a time, the old
guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir. Meanwhile, the casual
revelation last month that McCain has never figured
out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail
or Googled is rather startling. Kansascity.com

*
* * * *

Broad coalition backs
universal broadband—A broad coalition of Internet business
leaders, online gurus, community organizers and advocates across
the political spectrum launched a campaign Tuesday with the
lofty goal of universal high-speed Internet service. Better
broadband access and quality can be a boring and technical
issue, fraught with bureaucratic complications, admitted the
organizers for
InternetforEveryone.org. But they also see it as crucial to
the future of the U.S. economy, education and even the health of
democracy. At a news conference in New York, the group warned
that the United States is falling behind European and Asian
nations with Internet access that is more limited, more
expensive and slower. U.S. users pay an average of $53 a month
for high-speed service, compared with $32 in Germany and $33 in
Britain, according to one international survey. . . .A "digital
divide" among Internet users could also leave lower-income and
minorities behind, the coalition warned. According to the Census
Bureau, 35 percent of households with annual incomes below
$50,000 have broadband, while 76 percent of those with higher
incomes are connected. It's 'life and death'. High-speed
Internet is becoming crucial to democracy, said Van Jones, and
people are left out "when they don't have access to the
discussion in the blogosphere" or have access to specific
information in an emergency. MercuryNews

*
* * * *

As my taste in music changed from Blues infused
Urban Soul to Blues infused Urban Jazz, I can remember Marvin Gaye
ask the question we all wanted to know the answer to, “What’s Goin’ On!”What’s goin’ on with the Vietnam War? What’s goin’
on with the riots and the Panthers? What’s going on with Tricky
Dick Nixon? What’s goin’ on? What’s goin on? And, of course,
Marvin already had the answer. We all nodded in approval as Marvin
crooned his reply over every black, urban AM radio station in
America: “Mercy, mercy, me. Things ain’t what they used to
be!”

Some will see all that I have said as
coincidental. Those who see it as such are unaware of the mythic,
purgative, transforming power that music has for the Black
American. From plantation to plant floor, it has been hymns sung
in church, Blues screamed in jukes, and Jazz played in clubs that
have sustained us. And, if Hip-Hop is about anything, it is the
scream of Black youth at war with itself as it watches the death
of one world and the beginning of another.

But the Black youth of America are not alone in
their sense of profound confusion. For the whole world is singing
the death song of the Industrial Age. All that we see in our
children—the confusion, the obsession with drugs and thuggery,
the fascination with death—speaks of the dislocation of their
souls, their hearts, and their minds. A
Post Industrial Blues

* * *
* *

Jazz, blues, and their sacred cousin, gospel music, all have a
rhythm-device in common: the back-beat. Indeed, the back-beat, a
heavy emphasis on two and four, is a hallmark of African
American music and remains dominant as a rhythmic device into
the 21st century. An interesting note about the back-beat with
respect to gospel music is the flipping of rhythmic emphasis. In
the then popular waltz form, the emphasis was usually
ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. But in gospel, when three-four
time is used, as it frequently is, the practictioners usually
clap on two and three, thus getting a one-TWO-THREE,
one-TWO-THREE rhythm. The back-beat.

None of the other popular musics of the African diaspora
(whether from the Caribbean, Central America or South America)
employs a heavy back-beat unless the particular form in
question, such as salsa, reggae or soca, is a form that was
significantly influenced by Black music from America. This
absence of the back-beat is distinctive especially given that
most African diaspora music heavily uses drums, or quasi-drum
instruments (steel pans for example).

This is a curious development that is made even
more curious by the fact that for the most part the drums of the
diaspora remained hand-drums and it was in the United States
that the mechanical drum, or the drum kit, commonly called the
trap drum or traps, was developed. So the place where the drum
had the least continuity in terms of usage and in terms of the
direct retention of African poly-rhythms, is the place where the
back-beat was emphasized and the drum kit was developed! Clapping On Two and Four

This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost

This powerful and engaging historical novel is told in dialogue and through monologues. It also moves around in time, from the period when the story takes place to "interludes," in which the various characters look back on these events years later. It begins with a factual event—the largest slave auction in United States history that took place in 1859 on Pierce Butler's plantation in Georgia. The book introduces Butler, his abolitionist ex-wife Fanny Kemble, their two daughters, the auctioneer, and a number of slaves sold to pay off Butler's gambling debts. Emma, a fictional house slave, is the centerpiece of the novel. She cares for the master's daughters and has been promised that she will never be sold. On the last day of the auction, Butler impulsively sells her to a woman from Kentucky. There she marries, runs away, and eventually gains her freedom in Canada. Lester has done an admirable job of portraying the simmering anger and aching sadness that the slaves must have felt. Each character is well drawn and believable.

Both
blacks and whites liberally use the word "nigger,"
which will be jarring to modern-day students.

The text itself is easy to read and flows nicely. Different typefaces distinguish the characters' monologues, their dialogues with one another, and their memories.